“That’s a one-way ticket, Zephyr,” Twilight replies. “Oops, I meant a ‘one-trick pony’. It’s not gonna help us this time.”
We each take to the air as a fire blast goes our way, billowing out from the Silver Tower like dragon’s breath. I lance Jocelyn with electricity, but between the lambent heat and visual distortion I’m frankly fucked if I know whether it does much harm. All I can hear is Paragon bawling over and over again and it takes a moment to realize it’s because I can hear that shit in my mind.
I shoot a look at Nocturne.
“Hey, what gives?”
“I can feel his pain,” the caramel-skinned flake answers back.
“So keep it to yourself.”
I blink a moment, eyes still locked on the psychic chick with the always too-sensitive demeanor.
“Hey!” I bark to snap back her attention. “Can you get in there? Jocelyn’s mind?”
“It’s not Jocelyn in control,” Nocturne answers.
“Exactly,” I fire back.
Speaking of fire, the whole platform is now ablaze. Like a brooding creature from the lowest planes of Tartarus, Jocelyn turns and strides back through the archway into the building even as flames from her radiant aura boil the shining metal and crack the glass, disintegrating into fine grit as she passes.
*
TWILIGHT PULLS WHAT for all intents and purposes look like a series of spastic kung fu moves, declaring “Agamemnon’s cloak!” before a mantle of green flame bursts into existence around him. Swooping then out of the ether, he dive-bombs through the arch and disappears within the building, soon followed by gigantic caroming noises as he carries the battle to the foe.
I make fists, but I am distracted by the hopeless sobbing from Paragon, to which Silhouette adds many desperate looks. Metal drips in red-hot divots around us and the slinky heroine tries her best to tug the hapless glowing Paragon from where his misery has nailed him.
“Zephyr, please?” she calls.
I nod, dancing across the platform as Silhouette sighs and relinquishes her hold so I can exert a bit of super-strength, forcibly lifting Paragon from his place.
“C’mon, buddy,” I say rather shrilly, but thankfully he hears a familiar voice and lobs his arms and teary face over my shoulder and we bustle through into the interior.
Within, it’s pandemonium. I mean abyssal. The showboat formerly known as Jocelyn stands in the flaming wreckage of her own reception. A dozen unfamiliar fliers buzz about her blazing nimbus, Twilight in the thick of it green-cloaked. I also spot Vulcana (bouncing about), The Lark, Sunstorm and Vanguard (again). On the ground, bricks Susurrus, Coalface and Maxtor also seem to be having a good go, though only Coalface is able to weather the firestorm to even get close to laying a mitt on Jocelyn. As Jocelyn, I can’t understand how a mere fire-controller appears to have the combat chops she/he/it does, but then again channeling the power of a living star-god somewhat defies even the best attempts at logic, to call the exercise that.
Paragon clutches my arm, but I have to set him aside in a sand-blasted nook, telling him I’m sorry, but like fuck, duty calls, man. Language he’d understand.
“Sit with him, OK?” I tell Silhouette. “Make sure he doesn’t get himself killed.”
“And that’s my job, is it? Talk about sexism, Zephyr.”
“Rush in and open a can of whoop-ass on the alien star-god if you like,” I snap at her. “I’ll happily mop Para’s brow. I just figured, your power being to turn fucking two-dimensional and all, you might prefer to sit this one out.”
I glare at her, tempted to give a lecture about the version of her I met on The Twelve’s parallel and was a certified A-grade ass-kicker. But time’s of the essence. Silhouette gives that sort of begrudging silent nod that makes most people’s mouths screw up like a cat’s asshole and I nod back and turn once more into the breach.
Zephyr 12.14 “In Times Like These”
I WADE INTO the flaming chamber, much of Amadeus Chancel’s multi-million dollar designer ballroom juxtaposed with Dante’s Inferno. There’s no general in this battlefield, but my puff-chested presence instils a sort of benign calm, if only for a moment, yes, even if I do say so myself.
I snap my fingers at Nocturne, hovering above the locus of battle. All the chick does is float and fuck with people’s minds (I know, I say that like it’s a bad thing). She looks my way from beneath her cowl, the look I’m sure she’s practiced a thousand times in her bathroom mirror now somewhat missing the desired effect thanks to the sweat-inducing heatwave Jocelyn’s giving off.
“Can you jump-start Jocelyn’s mind and get her back in control of that thing?” I holler.
There’s nothing there to find, Nocturne says direct into my head.
I growl in frustration.
“I know we’re talking about Jocelyn, but there’s got to be something in there you can trace.”
Manticore lands beside me breathing like a rock-spider at a Most Glamorous Baby contest. He clutches my shoulder.
“My sting works on psionics, but it’s having no effect on Jocelyn or the mind within,” he says.
“It’s her kid,” I say.
“A baby?” Manticore replies.
“Sort of. A very angry, kind of billion-year-old baby called Ras Algethi.”
At the mere mention of the name, Jocelyn snaps around and a wave of liquid flame gushes towards us. Again I flinch, expressing outward with my fine-grain barometric telekinesis, super-heated particles meeting a high pressure zone fleetingly like a wall of stone. The fire disperses along the front and there are various zaps, ka-pows and brrrrrs as the assembled masks angle their attacks.
Jocelyn throws back her distended head and laughs, hair like a veritable hydra made of pure flame.
Even though the mental connection’s now mercifully ceased, I can still hear Paragon’s sobs. I shake my head.
“OK, Nocturne. We’ve been here before. Rig me up to everyone.”
She gives a curt signal and I focus my thoughts along with my rapidly beating heart. I fleetingly wish I had some of the focus techniques St George and the others promised could be mine. It would help in times like these and maybe even for dealing with Tessa.
Listen up, peeps, I shout telepathically. I know this is hard enough as it is, but we have to do this and leave Jocelyn unhurt. Like her or not, she’s Paragon’s lady, and that means she’s one of ours now, alright?
There are stares and silent rebukes. The battle ground falls silent except for the drip of liquefied support struts bubbling and dribbling away from the creaking superstructure above. Nonetheless – and it’s almost like Jocelyn herself awaits the nod – I sense a consensus in my unintended comrades.
“Good,” I say.
And just as I start to formulate the first inkling of a plan, the foreground fills with reddish light and WHAM, quick as you please, out step Sting, St George, DJ Ali, Shade, and bless my socks if it isn’t the Visionary himself with them.
“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” Sting says in that faux gentleman’s voice of his, skull face every bit the eerie cadaver. “You can stand down. We’re here now. We’ll take care of this threat, and every other world-class disaster for now on.”
To my chagrin, the cohort around me actually does relax, some even retreating and leaving me exposed at the front with a flagging look of disbelief amid the mayhem. My eyes rake over St George’s dapper suit, so similar to the one I last saw John Lennon wearing, and I take in McCartney’s tautly vinyl-wrapped bulk. Sting levels his gaze to mine and gives a showman-like bow.
“We told you before, Zephyr. You had your chance.”
“I was still thinking it over,” I answer lamely.
Sting gives a gruff laugh. “Oh really? Well think about it some more while we destroy this abomination.”
And he turns his back on me as concentric rings of psionic energy start to fill the room emanating from chakra points, his skeleton glowing within, Sting seemingly even more powerful than before
as he lifts into his favored flying lotus position.
I shake my head unseen.
No, I emote. You have to stop. Now.
*
OF COURSE, RAS Algethi is only willing to give us so much time. Sting hesitates, then vanishes in a wall of fire. Corpulent as he might be, McCartney’s lost none of his quick reflexes. He opens up with a broad-wash beam of blinding red energy on the spot last occupied by the star-god. Color pops and bursts across my retina, and like many of the others, I turn away.
There’s a howling noise. A horrible, curious, turgid, excessive, raw and emotional eminence that owes as much of its terror to the realm of the psychic than my mortal hearing. As the glare washes away, a syrupy mist dissipates and three scores masked, caped, feathered, costumed, vejazzled egomaniacs edge closer to see Jocelyn splayed on her back, arched on elbows, head tipped back in mockery of a woman in childbirth, her skin baked, flesh hanging away in giddyingly disgusting clumps from her skeleton, her head, now blind and mute, angling like the baby from Eraserhead as she seeks out a source of comfort that’s simply never coming.
As is my want, I move forward of the pack and look back to where Paragon has escaped Silhouette’s caution, bereft-looking, aghast as he sees what Sting’s shock troops have made of his love.
“No,” he simply says.
Mercifully, Jocelyn stops making that god-awful noise, a panoply of cats fucking unable to mirror it for sheer eeriness or horror. Her craning sucked lollipop-looking head tips back and caves in, neck giving way within, her last strength departing her as her arched supine form collapses in a red jellied heap.
All except her pregnant bulge.
And then we watch as a shocked and terrified unit as her child slowly digs its way clear of the ruin of its mother’s loins and turns its baleful gaze on us.
Zephyr 12.15 (Coda)
The tiny child’s face breaks free of Jocelyn’s muck and I am not alone in being shocked by the virulent anger it lavishes on what it sees, judging by the intake of breaths around me. Red-skinned and demonic-looking, Jocelyn and Paragon’s lovechild is nonetheless perfect. Perhaps more than perfect. In fact, maybe too much for its own good. Fresh flames burst across its angry skin as it digs itself clear with bonsai limbs and I swear to Christ the demented little thing mutters to itself as it scowls and surveys the room. Miss Black throws up. I hear Nocturne and even Shade sobbing. Paragon passes out like a starlet of the silent film era.
“Holy shit,” I murmur to no one in particular. “This is gonna be a tough sell.”
“That’s the nature of true heroism, Zephyr,” Sting says, stepping beside me. “A soldier exists to get his hands dirty so the rest of them can live clean. Are you ready to get dirty?”
“She was his wife, you cunt,” I snap.
“She was dead the moment the star-god infected her six months ago,” Sting says.
I drink this in as the baby gives a bedeviled mewling noise and breaks free of the last of the gloop that nourished it into existence. Ras Algethi’s radiance leaks from its black eyes, skin turning slowly the color of burnt chrome as it levitates from the ground and spins about to leverage that awful perverse gaze upon us. Its mouth opens.
“Bow to me or be destroyed,” the shrill yet corrosive and deeply unsettling voice booms through the shattered expanse of Chancel’s ballroom.
Beside me, Sting slowly shakes his head.
“There’s only one answer to this,” he says.
I get the sense of psionic goings on several levels of reality beyond my ken as Sting’s troops move throughout the otherwise frozen field of battle. The billion-year-old baby does his best bodybuilder impersonation, hunching over and flexing his tiny, deadly pissed off arms, and the building starts to shake, rumbling at the molecular level as it prepares for whatever master stroke of discharge looks likely to kill us all.
I’m damned if I know what to do.
It’s a strange moment. I feel outside my own cares. Despondent, I guess. I am tempted to kneel down and accept whatever comes next like a cosmic guillotine. Instead, St George and DJ Ali portal in behind the creature and the goofy yellow-goggled Brit places his ringed fingers on the monster’s back.
“Gotcha.”
They vanish together, back into the ether from whence they sprang.
The crushing force dissipates. The assembled heroes and heroines look about themselves with an ever-widening sense of reprieve. It’s too much for the building’s superstructure, of course, which starts to crumble above us, big chunks of important bits of the architecture starting to rain down. A bunch of other teleporters and fliers ferry people back through the landing bay.
I feel vaguely jilted. It’s not a sensation I really want to dwell on, lest I unearth even greater evidence of my own Thanatos instinct making the rest of life impossible. Instead, I look for something useful to do as Windsong bounds up to me and grabs me by the arm and starts tugging me to go with her.
“Come on, dad,” she hisses underbreath.
“What about the building?” I ask, hating how dazed I sound. “It’s coming down.”
“Don’t worry about that. I have it under control. It should be fine.”
The voice comes from Brasseye, the ensorcelled robot Tom O’Clock hovering with his Nineteenth Century carpet of a cloak whipping about him and his outstretched arms doing something unusual to the classical principles of our immediate surroundings. I sense rather than feel for myself that the rubble seems softer, less closely defined by its own mass as it starts to rain harder and faster. I simply nod, taking to the air myself and flitting with my daughter out through the flaming archway following all the others.
In the air outside and as the news broadcast has rendered us, we look like so many brightly colored gnats floating about the time lapse decay of the Silver Tower’s carcass as O’Clock controls the detritus to let the skull of the building cave in without further alarum. I search all available frequencies for sign of Sting or St George or Ali or Shade or even the Visionary, but all are gone, mysteriously whisked away, the astronomical interloper with them.
Zephyr 13.1 “Without Further Ado”
THERE IS SOMETHING of a tradition among masks: the dawn glutting of depleted metabolisms after a bender. Often I commit to it alone, slinking into some god-forsaken diner beneath an overpass, gorging myself on my own body weight in trans fats to restore some kind of reckless inner chi. Considering the night we’ve just had, I’m strangely glad of the company as my masked daughter Windsong, Miss Black and New New Sentinels Mastodon, Manticore, Vulcana (surly as ever) and Susurrus (the brick made of twigs), and even with my dislike of ‘bots in general, the man of the hour Tom O’Clock. I guess the hatchet’s been buried after whatever fucking calamity I led these clowns into last time, though it’s not exactly Happy Central as we dine on cheeseburgers and fried egg waffles and egg creams. It doesn’t help that I have to cadge a twenty from Tessa, my poverty like a bum note during a drunken symphony as I briefly take a time-out to wonder when the last time it was I actually slept and where I was when I did it. But the revelers quickly drag me back in. The ‘Don is obsessed with making up, and making up for lost time, though I demur from his proffered handful of horse tranquilizers, moving with a light-headed swagger through the shithole greasy spoon to sidle up beside Annie Black, ignorant and ignoring the horrid looks Windsong shoots at me from her entrapment in a conversation with Susurrus about techniques for handling attack by fire-controllers. Away from his super-sized superhero form, he’s a nerdy guy in his late 20s with a frightening resemblance to Where’s Waldo minus the cap and scarf.
“Yo, Blackster,” I say and manage not to belch as images of Jocelyn’s splattered cadaver swim behind my watery eyes.
I go to sit and nearly miss the stool and realize its fatigue and a generally fucked-up metabolic system responsible for my havoc more than any drink, stymied and at the same time foiled by my supercharged system.
“Hey Zephyr,” Miss Black smiles, fairly sozzled h
erself, enough to be unawares of my unglamorous trip. “What’s shakin’?”
“I should ask you that,” I reply, not entirely clear of my own meaning, eyes straying to her admirable cleavage that seems to have grown with Annie’s burgeoning maturity, a teen sorceress no longer. As mentioned, her dress is set to stun despite the disheveled hour. I manage to get my tongue back into gear before Annie notices, her eyes a tad glassy.
“Ask me what?”
“You still with the Feebs?”
“Uh-huh. Synergy says hi.”
“She didn’t make the wedding, huh?”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh, I forgot,” I say, and brain running loose, add, “Thought she might’ve snuck in with Vanguard and the others.”
“Hey, I got an actual invite,” Annie replies. “It’s pretty hard to gatecrash a wedding without, you know, an actual body. Jacqueline the Bodiless, we’re calling her these days.”
She gives a snarky laugh despite my frown.
“Her name’s not Jacqueline.”
“It’s not?”
Our mutual confusion settles like a pall over the conversation and I take a slug from her coffee. Addled, Annie leans into my arm, echoed by an aching pulse in my loins.
I turn on the TV grin and Miss Black bats her blackened lashes, trying to remain doe-eyed and coy under my high beams without either of us admitting we know exactly what’s going on.
*
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO we adjourn outside the greasy diner, dawn throwing a greyscale effect over the day. The bridge towers over us like a decrepit spaceport from some post-apocalyptic parallel, the gargling rush of elevated traffic with everything but the fumes as Annie trips holding my hand until we get under the shadow of the huge concrete plinths, me kicking aside dead drunk homeless people and abandoned TV sets, old washing machines, microwave ovens, dented keyboards, toasters, rotary telephones, refrigeration panels, the inside of old sofas, mildewed boxes of broken bed springs and fluorescent tubes, the eviscerated working parts of 80s-era Packard Bell computers like the sifted entrails of some demented technopath’s auguries as we head deeper into the gruesome bowels of some Luddite hell, Miss Black and me, the blood pulsing in my ears hard enough I can barely hear her anxiously reluctant laughter as I swing her into a private alcove and slide my hands up either sides of her bare legs, lifting the double-split hem of her midnight black gown to quickly butcher the sexy underwear she spent days dithering about before committing to buy.
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